Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. This marks Shaw’s second solo presentation with the gallery, and runs concurrently with the artist’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles titled The Wig Museum, on view at the Marciano Art Foundation through September 17.

For nearly forty years Shaw has been creating an expansive body of work—paintings, drawings, installations, sculpture, video, and sound—elucidating America’s social and spiritual histories. For this current exhibition the artist continues to illustrate overarching themes of belief, doubt, and politics—addressing such prescient topics as failing economies and crumbling power structures.

In a new series of paintings rendered on found theatrical backdrops, Shaw summons a mélange of superheroes, cultural figures, folkloric iconography, and apocalyptic forces of nature. A second body of work features black and white paintings in which Shaw utilizes the “cut-up method” used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin to collage a picture of the near future. Here Shaw depicts worlds of chaos and control informed by a constant dialogue with art history and the spirit of Silver Age comics. The exhibition also features a selection of drawings—studies for the larger paintings­—offering an intimate sense of the artist’s process of generating anomalous and timeless characters and scenarios. In an adjacent room Shaw premieres his short film Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), a sequence of introductory segments to a fictional television series reminiscent of early 1960s psychological horror shows. Weaving fact and fiction, Shaw ambitiously explores history and its fringes in a search for rationality in contemporary life.

Jim Shaw (born 1952 in Midland, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita. His work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including major surveys at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2017); New Museum, New York, NY (2015); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2015); Chalet Society, Paris, France (2013), traveled to Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2012); Musee de’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2010); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2007); MAGASIN, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2003); Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2001); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK (2000). In 2013 his work was included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. His work is also featured in prominent public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Perfectly Concocted Context by Jonathan Monk brings together three generations of artists within the frame of Jonathan Monk’s studio.

The walls of the gallery space will be wallpapered with full-scale photographs of the interior of Monk’s studio, which contains works by many artists that Monk both admires and uses in his own practice. Against the fictive backdrop of his studio, Monk will place inside the gallery space, a diverse group of artworks. Monk will present the studio – a site of reflection and production – as a finished artwork, layering the artist’s studio within the gallery.

A number of the artists included in the show have been influenced by the city of Los Angeles and its rich history of artistic production. The exhibition acts as an homage to these artists while also inviting playful parallels between the works shown in this “concocted context.”

Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester, England (b.1969) and lives and works in Berlin. Throughout his career he has used conceptual and minimal art as a form of readymade referring playfully to other artists in his work. Monk has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel, Switzerland), Irish Museum of Art (Dublin, Ireland), Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK), Swiss Institute (New York, USA), The Menil Collection (Houston, USA).

Katy Cowan On Ropes and Bronze...

Jun 24 - Aug 19, 2017

Cherry and Martin is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Katy Cowan’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to present a survey of paintings by Morris Louis. The exhibition will be on view from June 23 through August 19, 2017.

“It could be argued that Louis's synthesis of the separable elements of painting is the most complete and complex to date; and that the veils announce a new phase in the history of art.”
- Barbara Rose, “Quality in Louis,” Artforum, Oct. 1971

Before his untimely death at the age of 50 in 1962, Morris Louis painted more than 650 canvases. Working on the floor in his small suburban dining room studio, Louis developed his particular style of staining unprimed canvas with Magna acrylic by pouring the liquid pigment onto the canvas and directing it to run across, down, and around the canvas. Art historian and critic Barbara Rose acknowledged Louis's importance in the history of painting by pointing to his pivotal series of “veils,” so called due to the curtain-like washes of gossamer color Louis laid onto the canvases. Along with his veils, Louis's unfurled and stripe series mark crucial moments in his oeuvre, in the evolution of Color Field painting, and in American painting more broadly.

Drawing upon the twin influences of Jackson Pollock's unprecedented athleticism and all-over composition and Helen Frankenthaler's groundbreaking use of pigment to stain the canvas in her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea, Louis was driven to find pathways that would lead to new ways to paint. While Pollock put distance between his brush and the canvas by dripping the paint from the end of his brushes and Frankenthaler combined direct staining with traditional paint application, Louis eradicated tools from his process altogether, pouring his pigment onto unprimed canvas then using gravity to direct the paint over the canvas as it absorbed into the warp and weft of the fabric.

Though Louis pursued a pure abstraction unhindered by associations to anything beyond the picture, the veils recall formations of land affected by the movement of water: rivulets and channels of running water, erosion, fluvial planes. The unfurled and stripe series possess a boldness and immediacy that achieves full non-representation. This exhibition will look at the various periods of Louis's short but extraordinary career with paintings that have been largely unseen on the west coast.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce L.A. Paintings, an exhibition of new paintings by Düsseldorf-based artist Erik Olson, to be presented from July 15 through August 19, 2017. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 15th, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

L.A. Paintings represents Erik Olson’s ongoing project with portraiture and is the culmination of several years of exploration and experimentation in his Düsseldorf studio and a period of intense production in Los Angeles. Portraying friends and colleagues as well as people he has an interest in, these bold, expressive paintings present the genre of portraiture as fluid as identity itself, offering a range of possibilities that lead us back to a central question: how do we define the individual in this present moment? In response, Olson posits these questions:

“Is it skin color? Is it gender or sexual orientation? Is it the place a person lives or where they are born? Is it religion or the ethnic group we belong to? Is it a Facebook profile or an Instagram post that defines us? Can you understand the human psyche through new innovations in neuroscience? The paintings answer none of these questions, yet, I am trying to present in a concrete way what I see as some of the most pressing questions of our time—how do we define the individual and how will this shape our sense of identity over time?

Olson’s paintings range from objective, observation-based representations to half cropped or framed portraits to more abstract and obscured geometric formations. While all of the work is within the frame of a ‘bust’ or traditional head and shoulders presentation, each painting proceeds in dramatically different directions, highlighting the very malleable idea of identity. Color is both specific and vague. Likewise, brushstrokes both define observations and fall off into process-based mark-making. The work oscillates between portraying the individual in an analytic sense as well as taking on a more intuitive approach, beyond knowledge.

Erik Olson (born 1982, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) has lived a nomadic life, having been raised in Calgary, Boston, and Nairobi as a child. He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver in 2007. In 2014 and 2015, he attended the critically acclaimed Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a guest student of Peter Doig. Olson has been the subject of solo exhibitions in major cities across Canada and internationally in Europe and the United States. His work has been featured in Juxtapoz, ELLE Canada, The London Free Press, London Yodeller, and The Telegraph, among others. He currently lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Andy Warhol’s fascination with the features and shape of women’s lips can be traced back to his earliest personal work in addition to his work as a commercial illustrator. It flourished in his most iconic works of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Chairman Mao, where Warhol would highlight his subjects’ lips, outlining and coloring each pair of lips in ways that made them the focal point of each painting. As if to prove this point, in 1962 he made the painting “Marilyn’s Lips”– a diptych that isolated and repeated Marilyn’s lips 168 times; the painting is now in the collection of the Hirsshorn Museum.

For four decades, the depiction of lips was a touchstone for Warhol — a signature trademark that he returned to again and again in varied forms. It is tempting to read into this. Were his renderings of lips an expression of the artist’s sublimated need for love, or sex, or communication? Was he interested in the individuality of each pair of lips? The form? The suggestiveness? All of the above?

While Warhol had started doing occasional commissioned portraits in the 1960s, by the 1970s it had become his main source of income and a relentless focus of his attention. To make these portraits he would take a Polaroid picture of the sitter which was then transferred to an enlarged silkscreen. Tracing simple outlines onto the canvas first, Warhol would underpaint the mouth and eye area so that when the silkscreen was applied on top those features would stand out. As always, it was his subject’s lips that interested Warhol the most, so much that in 1975 – always the avid bookmaker – Warhol created three different unique albums printing and/or collaging images of more than 60 different pairs of lips onto the album pages. Andy Warhol: Lips showcases twenty-five works from one of these books; of the other two, one is in the collection of The Warhol Museum and the other remains with the Warhol Foundation.

The process is unusual. The lips are silkscreened onto various different tapes, from masking tape to packing tape to scotch tape, and then placed and adhered on to the 8 x 8 1⁄2” page. Because of the thin width of most of the tapes the substrate tape is laid down in layers. Sometimes the tape is laid down roughly and unevenly, other times the tape is trimmed to the outer edges of the lips. Most of the pairs of lips are hastily filled in, with clearly outlined edges. Color saturation is such that sometimes they look like black shapes, here and there fading into grey. They become simple forms, and the original photograph disappears beneath the pattern. The very handmade nature of each collage stands in interesting counterpoint to Warhol’s proclaimed interest in the machine-made and the hands-off approach he adopted throughout his career.

Until one of the “Lips” albums was exhibited at The Warhol Museum, the Morgan Library in their “Warhol: By the Book” shows (2015 – 2016) and reproduced in part in the extensive monograph “The Warhol Look” (1997), these particular types of work were virtually unknown. However, we now can see these unique collages as pure Warhol – isolated, mysterious, and glamorous. Repeating and varying in form, hovering between figurative and abstraction, each singular piece tells its own story and presents its own seductive identity in true Warhol fashion.